Salford plans integrated care system

Salford Royal NHS Foundation Trust wants to create a single integrated care organisation in the area, underpinned by its Allscripts electronic patient record system.

Almost a year after the trust went live with the Sunrise Clinical Manager from the American supplier, the trust’s chief executive, Sir David Dalton, told EHI that the system is in full use across the trust, with new functionalities being developed regularly.

“What we have in Salford Royal now is a system which allows our clinical staff to have immediate access to patient data. The system that we have lends itself to one of the values we have in Salford Royal, which is the value of accountability and responsibility,” he said.

“If we don’t get things right, to be able to interrogate the record and see immediately those things that should’ve happened that perhaps didn’t, is very useful, so the EPR suits us very well.”

He said that one of the trust’s future plans is to create “further integration and development within the city of Salford.”

“This is, I hope, creating a new integrated care organisation, and at the heart of that will be our ability to share information about people that we are supporting,” said Sir David.

“We will look at how we develop our system with the partners in health and care in Salford to build something which allows us to be one of the leaders in population health improvement.”

The trust is also looking at a project, working with “partners in Wigan, Bolton and Central Manchester as we design new systems which allow patients to move across organisational boundaries.”

“The thing that glues it all together will be our electronic patient record,” he said.

The trust first announced its plans to take the Allscripts EPR in August 2012 before going live, three months ahead of schedule, with e-prescribing, order communications, results reporting, nursing assessments, doctors' notes, clinical summaries and clinical decision support in June 2013.

A year on, the trust is due to go live with its bed management module next week. Sir David said the system is well used by clinical staff, who “they very much like the system.”

He said that the trust had taken clinical engagement very seriously, to the point where the funding for the system largely comes out of the trust’s clinical directorates’ budget.

“We have challenged our organisation in the way we have funded the acquisition of the system to make a connection to improving our financial position,” he said.

“We would only be procuring the system if our clinical directorates were buying into it. Not just accepting its use, but actually committing to spend their money, the money that would be spent on providing care and services in this procurement. Effectively it’s our clinical services that have given us the money to buy the system.”

Allscripts recently opened up its European headquarters in Manchester, close to both its UK customers, Salford Royal and Liverpool Heart and Chest NHS Foundation Trust.